


let me down gently

by althusserarien (ArmchairElvis)



Series: The Tangent Universe [2]
Category: House M.D.
Genre: Drug Use, F/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-03
Updated: 2012-11-03
Packaged: 2017-11-17 16:13:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/553454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmchairElvis/pseuds/althusserarien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>House doesn't know exactly what he was expecting, but he likes what he's seeing, anyway.</i> One way House meets Cuddy.</p><p>Part two of two House/Cuddy stories set in alternate universes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	let me down gently

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://nightdog-barks.livejournal.com/profile)[**nightdog_barks**](http://nightdog-barks.livejournal.com/) and [](http://phinnia.livejournal.com/profile)[**phinnia**](http://phinnia.livejournal.com/) for previewing, and [](http://nomad1328.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://nomad1328.livejournal.com/)**nomad1328** for the late-night beta.

_Let me down, let me down gently / when the police come to get me / I'm listening to dance music._  
Dance Music // The Mountain Goats

The first time House meets Cuddy, they're on a blind date. It's a complete and unmitigated disaster.

It's all Wilson's fault, another one of his nefarious schemes, part of the _plan_ that House knows he has. It didn't work out so well last time, but Wilson is very persistent. He's on a quest to set House up with someone.

Wilson thinks that House is convinced that all women are heartless vampires just because Stacy left him. It's transparent enough. He keeps dropping hints. Wilson as a matchmaker is kind of unsubtle, and Wilson playing the love doctor makes House want to tell him to back off and pay attention to his own marriage.

It's been eight months since Stacy left. In that time House has only gone out with someone once, and it was more a one-night stand than a serious thing.

He should hate Stacy, but he doesn't. He thinks about her food, about the weekend they drove up to Vermont. About _her_. About how he wound down the window to let the cold air rush in, sharp, just to see if she'd be annoyed. They'd been together fifteen months, then, and House had thought that he'd reached some sort of threshold. That they were both happy and they could both just stay that way, in a careful sort of equilibrium. He was wrong. It wasn't him, either. It was Stacy that did the leaving, Stacy that made the rash decisions, Stacy who butchered his music collection. That rankles the most.

He can't help but think that he shouldn't have gotten angry. He should have moved to DC for a while, tried it out. He should have tried. He can't help but feel this odd sort of deflation, like he caught the boat but jumped.

So the last thing he wants to do, really, is go out with Wilson's cousin or a doctor who Wilson knows, or anybody Wilson thinks is _suitable_. He wants to work and drink and play the piano and just... forget.

When Wilson first suggests that House might like his endocrinologist friend, House immediately goes on the offensive. _She's funny_ , Wilson says, this coming from a man who watches Brady Bunch reruns.

It’s a little bit creepy to think that your best friend has his eye out for you, and House wants to discourage Wilson from this practice as soon as possible. Wilson thinks that too many of his single friends are open game for all sorts of awkward dates.

“Keep your eye on your _wife_ ,” he says one Monday afternoon, as he watches Wilson whack a golf ball inexpertly into the driving range. “You’re a married man, not a Jewish grandmother.” Wilson purses his lips, and House steps up to his own tee. "Try dressing up in drag, and ask me again. Just like that time-"  


"Okay," Wilson says. "I get it. Shut up."

On Wednesday night, over a bottle of beer, Wilson tries again. House ostentatiously switches the TV over to the Playboy mansion. After Wilson has gone home (probably to dragon lady Bonnie, waiting with her hands on her hips), House checks the time and calls Stacy in DC. They've been playing phone tag for weeks. He leaves an inappropriate message on her machine.

On Thursday Wilson gives House that 'I'm about to rant' face over his Heart Association Approved salad.  
"No, Wilson," House says as he shoves a few French fries into his mouth, "It's just... _weird_."

“What’s weird about it?” Wilson says. “She’s a department head at Princeton General. Those in the know say she’s being considered as the next Dean of Medicine. She went to UPenn.”

“An administrator?” House says. “Doesn’t that mean our children will turn out sterile?”

“Don’t get too far ahead of yourself,” Wilson says. “Wear that green shirt with the cream buttons.”

And just like that House realises he's been worn down. He says yes despite himself, even though he's thoroughly creeped out by the fact that Wilson kept tabs on the colour of his shirt buttons. 

“Give her my number,” he says. “I draw the line at making personal calls to administrators.” He goes back to work and forwards creepy articles to Wilson.

He comes back from his evening run on Monday to find that Lisa Cuddy has left a message on his answering machine. He listens to it as he drinks water straight from the kitchen faucet. She has an okay voice. She wants to meet on Friday, and can Greg get back to her?

House looks around and realises for the first time how empty his apartment seems. It never seemed that empty _before_ Stacy moved in. It's just one bedroom, not a big place. But his. It's like she took something else along with the throw rugs and the Klimt prints when she left.

House puts his feet up on the coffee table and opens the first of the four or five bottles of beer he has in the fridge.

 

House regrets the decision almost as soon as he steps foot out of the house. It’s Friday night, and he had the day off work. It was time in lieu, because prior to that he'd been at work since Tuesday morning.

A guy on his dialysis service developed endocarditis, and as soon as he'd finished dealing with that the ER turfed a kid with a belly rash and bloody diarrhea to ID, who called in House after they ran a coag panel, twenty minutes before he was going to eat lunch. He discharged the kid and caught a taxi home, because he didn’t trust himself on the road. He was wired on too much coffee, and the tablets of dex (wrapped in a twist of paper, swiped from a clinic miscount) he kept in his desk drawer in case of emergencies had left him feeling headachey and jittery. He let himself into his apartment and dropped his bag in the middle of the living room floor. He fell asleep as soon as he'd pulled his shoes off.

After seven hours of sleep he wakes, hot and thirsty and feeling a lot better, so he showers and puts on a shirt that Wilson didn't recommend.

They meet outside the restaurant, a nice-looking new place on Witherspoon with good beer on tap. Cuddy's hair is long but tied back, and she's wearing a low-cut blouse. House didn't know exactly what he was expecting, but he likes what he's seeing, anyway. She smiles. They find the table, House trying not to look clueless. She flicks her napkin out. There's something almost prim but not quite in her gestures.

After the usual nonsense talk (med school, work,) House realises he’s gone dry. He’s as close to burnout as he ever gets, and his senses feel hypersensitised by the adrenaline of the case and the fatigue. He can hear the conversation of the couple behind them, somebody talking about the latest Clint Eastwood flick, the faraway hiss of a hot saucepan, plates clacking together. He has a brief but crazy image of himself leaning forward, putting on a suave toothy grin, and saying _so, tell me about you_.

Cuddy smiles awkwardly, as if he reminds her of someone or she knows exactly what he's thinking. He reflects with a dumb sort of surprise that this date isn't actually going so badly, even though he's frantically searching for things to say. 

Cuddy takes a sip of wine and says "Usually I'm the one who doesn't talk much. My last date -- God, it was this asshole accountant from Plainsboro. He never stopped talking about how he was going to duck out of his child support payments..."

He realises he's smiling.

What happens happens, and on the next date he kisses her outside her neat little house. As she fumbles the door open a brief panicky refrain of _ohgodwhatamIthinking_ runs through his brain, but he ignores it. And it's good.

In the morning he shivers as he pulls his cold clothes on. He can't find his socks. She breathes softly behind him, and he tries to tiptoe quietly down the hallway.

He looks at the artsy black-and-white photos on her walls, the fine-looking glass bowls on open shelves in her kitchen, catching the early morning sun. He thinks of his own cold apartment, the piano dominating the living room on the dusty floor, and he decides he doesn't need to sneak out of Cuddy's place like he's trying to escape a curfew.

He works out how to use Cuddy's coffee machine and dips into the books on the shelf by the breakfast bar.

Soon it turns into a kind of regular on-and-off thing. He likes the uncertainty, the way he can walk away if things get too prickly. It's different from what he had with Stacy -- with Stacy there were the long fights, the silences, the angry sex. What he has with Cuddy are late-night visits, something to forget work and frustration for a while.

Then he gets fired. It's nothing, really, just the little matter of a random urine test, but Cuddy goes ballistic. House chooses his words very carefully, and they're rather vitriolic, even for him. So he doesn't call Cuddy and she doesn't call him, and he buys himself a Nintendo 64 and spends days mastering Mario Kart instead.

"What happened?" Wilson's specialty is asking annoying questions he already knows the answer to.

"We ended it. I got fired." House is over at Wilson's. Bonnie's somewhere else, which means House can drink beer and make nachos in the microwave without weathering waves of disapproval.

Wilson shakes his head. "Yeah, the fired thing I know about. Is this a real "end", or is this just you being too stubborn to call her back?"

House watches Wilson's weird little dog scratch himself. He doesn't know how to answer that.

He sits in his apartment. He goes to a bar. He buys a new set of speakers for his stereo. He tries to work out what he's lost this time. He sleeps late, because he doesn't have to get up for anything, and there's nothing to wake him.

He's playing golf with Wilson when it happens. He remembers that first (last) day only in a bunch of incredibly vivid but disconnected snapshots: the bright blue sky and the sun in his eyes as he crouches over on the eighth hole. Vomiting on the nice, clean floormat of Wilson's car.

And Cuddy, of course. Cuddy with that look of half-bewildered panic in her eyes. As soon as he sees that he knows that there is something extremely wrong with this picture.

The last thing he remembers out of the whole fucked-up scenario is scrawling something approximating his signature on the release form, half-mad with pain. His eyes barely focused.

"I know what you want," Cuddy says, her voice sharp. "But you're killing yourself."

"No," he says, his throat dry. "I'm not."

"House! Do you want to die?" He realises her voice is high with panic, and that he's drifting away. It's the pain, or the medication, or something. It's hard to think. Or easier not to think, anyway. It's almost scary.

"I don't want to die. I can wait this out." He closes his eyes, and there's a frenzy of beeping to his left that he instinctively recognises as a bad sound, and there's a heavy, crushing pain in his chest. And after that, nothing.

Everything was too little, too late, but he tries to tell himself that nothing could have made a difference. When he wakes up he's missing three days and a quarter of his quadriceps.

When Cuddy offers him a job after months of sitting at home watching soap operas and taking too many pills, he tries not to think of it as pity, or an apology, or her way of trying to make amends. But it is. He takes the job. He wants to work. Part of the time, at least.

He writes a letter of resignation and stuffs it in his desk drawer, unsigned.

He sleeps through his clinic hours. Cuddy brings him files, unspoken apologies in her eyes. It's no fun.

Stacy comes to Princeton, and he gets to watch her try to cover her surprise at his thin, drawn face and the hesitant way he walks, even with the cane. No meeting with an ex could ever be worse than this: Stacy staring at his empty refrigerator, the framed posters he never got around to putting up still leaning against the wall.

"Like what I've done with the place?" She crosses her arms like she's cold, but her face is softer, less defensive. House grabs his coat off the back of the couch. He wants to go somewhere else. He wants to talk. 

"Maybe I should leave. Go somewhere else."

Stacy waits for him awkwardly at the bottom of the steps.

"Greg," Stacy says, and there's this note of caring in her voice that hits him right in the gut. "Stay here. Get better. See Cuddy." And when she says goodbye, she puts her arms around him, tight. It's been so long since he was close to someone like this, and his life has been shaken up so much that he can hardly tell up from down. He swallows hard and thinks of all the stupid fights, about work and the little mental reflex he gets when he thinks about the things he doesn't do anymore.

The next week, he dials in a large pizza order, to Cuddy's office. After she's done bawling out the poor delivery kid and paying for it out of her own pocket, House saunters into her office in just enough time to scarf down most of it.

"What a coincidence," Cuddy says, pointing a finger at it. "Some mysterious person has ordered a pizza with your favourite topping on it."

"Yeah," House says as he hefts the box. "That's just weird."

It's hard climbing up Cuddy's front steps. Knocking on her door is harder. It's probably a bad idea. But he does it anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally published on LiveJournal in 2009, [here](http://joe-pike-junior.livejournal.com/193352.html).


End file.
